Wednesday, April 26, 7:45 pm

"Boland has emerged as one of the best poets in Ireland." --Denis Donoghue, The New York Review of Books

Universally acknowledged as the preeminent female poet of her native Ireland, Eavan Boland was born in Dublin in 1944 and has published nine volumes of poetry. She made her American debut with Outside History: Selected Poems 1980-1990, followed by In a Time of Violence, which explored what she called "the history of silences: the unspoken, the unwritten, the forgotten names, invisible chronicles." More recently, The Lost Land (1998) explores a series of metaphors for life's moments of transition and transformation, as well as, literally, the Ireland she has left behind. But the painful transitions are necessary, as a poem to her daughter, "The Blossom," suggests:

Then holds out a dawn-soaked hand to me
whose fingers I counted at birth years ago.
And touches mine for the last time.
And falls to earth.

The Lost Land, in this new work, is "not exactly a country and not entirely a state of mind…It is the poet's own, single, and private account of the ghostly territory where so much human experience comes to be stored." Eavan Boland's public life has included frequent reviews in the Irish Times, numerous radio broadcasts, and teaching positions at Trinity College, Bowdoin College, and the University of Iowa. She is currently the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University.